Welcome to CraniumNet for Authors.

CraniumNet offers a unique opportunity for subject matter experts who are clear and concise communicators, captivating, entertaining writers and presenters, and devoted to helping others through sharing their knowledge.

To attract the world’s top experts and communicators, we designed a teaching opportunity that, for the right person, will be substantially more rewarding to other teaching options, such as writing books, creating DVDs or online courses, or teaching live classes, not only financially, but in many other ways.

The current knowledge distribution model:

Let’s start by describing the current model for creating and distributing educational content:

Experts and teachers write books, teach in classrooms, or create training on DVDs, CDs or online. If they’re self-published, they also market and sell their products and classes.

The potential student is faced with a bewildering array of information resources. Although a few are good, many are low quality, with confusing, jumbled information, errors, often in a format not optimum for the information being presented, and with very little advantage over free information resources like product manuals or popular websites.

Due to uncoordinated positioning, branding, and marketing efforts, sales are often disappointing for the amount of time and effort invested by the author. The best training products are sometimes “lost in the shuffle”, eclipsed by other, lower quality products with stronger marketing efforts.

CraniumNet model

Now let’s examine CraniumNet’s model for creating and distributing educational content:

1. One or more experts decide to form a CraniumNet KnowledgePod™ to share their knowledge in a specific field. A number of experts can join all at once, or the Pod can start with one Author and grow one at a time.
2. Authors design an organized, collaborative curriculum of courses focused towards a specific demographic of Learners. The courses are complimentary and dovetail together seamlessly to provide the Learner with a modular, flexible way to attain mastery in this topic area.
3. Authors and their Ambassador choose who is assigned to author or co-author each course.
4. Courses are then created using CraniumNet’s course creation process, guidelines and tools—a system perfected over many years by the best in the business.
5. Authors can review each other’s work to catch errors, make suggestions for improvements, spread out the workload and produce higher quality courses in a shorter period of time than Authors working alone.
6. Authors also have a collaborative environment and guidelines in which to co-author courses if they choose to, further reducing course completion times and increasing course quality.
7. While course creation is in progress, Ambassadors (and Authors) identify and recruit suitable Affiliates for this KnowledgePod.
8. A complete KnowledgePod consists of the entire collaborative group, including Authors, Ambassadors, the Courses, and Affiliates.
9. Customized MOD Machines are created for each Affiliate. Similar to (but with distinct advantages over) Apple’s “iTunes”, the MOD Machine is a software program downloaded from the internet which allows users to browse through and order courses for download to their hard drive.
10. The courses are protected through our own proprietary DRM (Digital Right Management) process which prevents the user from copying the files or playing them outside the SmartScreen.
11. Once sufficient courses are completed, along with free courses or excerpts for potential Learners to sample, the KnowledgePod launches and courses begin to sell. Learners are presented with an organized, coherent curriculum, consistently presented from multiple Affiliates and Author/Affiliates.
12. As each new course is finished, it is automatically syndicated to all Affiliate MOD Machines.
13. Affiliates, Ambassadors and Authors all work together to drive potential Learners to this KnowledgePod, leading to a powerful, coordinated marketing effort that builds critical mass in this field and propels this KnowledgePod to be a market leader in providing training in this field.

CraniumNet Author Benefits

focus

Focus on doing what you do best—sharing your knowledge. Let others handle administrative, marketing, technical, legal, and bookkeeping hassles

build critical mass

The combined brilliance of a group of top experts all working together, and many extremely popular affiliates in your KnowledgePod creates a “critical mass” singularity that attracts the lion’s share of Learners

scalability

You can choose to create a small course that can be finished in a week or less, or a major course taking months to create, or anywhere in between, to fit your workflow preference, schedule, and your KnowledgePod’s curriculum strategy

collaboration opportunities

With other expert Authors in your field, to bounce ideas off of, have review or test courses, or co-author

income

We predict a more lucrative return per hour of time invested than most any other teaching opportunity

a high quality authoring experience

Flexibility of presentation format

a superior learning experience for the student

The MOD Machine Player environment combines most the best aspects of classroom teaching, book, disc-based and online learning, without many of the drawbacks

build your brand

The prestige and credibility being part of a group of the top experts in a specific fields in one of the most advanced, most prominent learning environments in the world. The author is featured in the listing and detail pages for all courses, helping promote your name and brand to anyone browsing through the available catalog list

syndication

your courses are syndicated to the entire CraniumNet Affiliate Network (LSAN). As this network grows, this gives you a huge group of potential buyers of your courses the instant the course is completed

Your own instant University

Become an Author/Affiliate

Authors are encouraged, if appropriate, to also become an Affiliate of CraniumNet. This means you will offer potential students, at no cost and very little trouble, a special version of the Leaping Brain MOD Machine with your logo and skin, and promote this as a download from your website, and on discs distributed at trade shows, user groups, or anywhere potential students might gather. You will offer your courses through your MOD Machine, and you can also choose to be an Affiliate for any other Author’s courses you wish.

A primary objective in the design of CraniumNet business model was to ensure that being an Author/Affiliate of CraniumNet will be less work and provide more profit than publishing training products on your own.

CraniumNet exclusively contracts Leaping Brain, Inc., for all course creation and distribution technology. Leaping Brain retains 20% of all revenue collected to cover technology licensing fees, credit card and other e-commerce related fees, hosting, server and bandwidth costs, software development, technical support, and other expenses.

Of the 80% passed through to CraniumNet, CraniumNet retains 15% to cover operations. All the rest goes to our partners: Authors, Affiliates, Ambassadors, and Publishers.

You have an option to be immediately emailed every time a customer purchases one of your courses, and you can check your current royalty statement online at any time.

As you peruse this information, keep in mind the difference between percentage and actual dollar amounts, for example, 36% of $200,000 is a higher dollar amount than 100% of $70,000.

If you do choose to launch your own University, you will make varying percentages of total revenue depending on whether your course is sold by someone else, you sell another Author’s course, and so on.

CraniumNet vs. self-publishing

The question of whether you will do better with CraniumNet rather than publishing educational products yourself is a question we can’t answer, since every Author’s situation is unique. Perhaps the following will help:

When publishing your own training, you receive all the revenue, and pay all expenses, such as credit card fees, e-commerce fees & percentage, software development, disc replication, shipping, server and bandwidth costs, and/or long distance telephone out of that total revenue.

If you become an Author/Affiliate of CraniumNet, you will receive 54% – 60% of CraniumNet revenue on courses you author and sell, plus 14% in Marketing Support Funds specifically for your branded University. You pay no expenses except for course creation costs (and any marketing you choose to do with your own University).

In addition, you’ll be receiving income from your courses being syndicated through all other Affiliates, as well as making a percentage of all Author’s courses sold through your SmartScreen.

Consider that hours you would have spent on unpaid administrative tasks you can now spend on creating new courses, meaning that you will most likely be able to author more courses with the extra time.

So we feel there are many situations in which an expert author will do far better with CraniumNet than going it alone.

How long will it take me to write and produce a course?

This will vary widely. A simple course on a single software technique might be completed in a weekend, where a course requiring many video shoots and a lot of post-production could take several months.

Our median benchmark is 60 hours to outline and script, and 60 hours to produce, for a total of 120 hours. By “median” we mean we expect about half the courses to be produced more quickly, and about half will take longer than 120 hours.

How many courses can I expect to sell?

This is a function of:

• how well your course is described on the Course Details screen

• how much your course description resonates with, and is in demand by, potential learners

• how popular your Affiliate(s) are, and

• how your course is priced.

Your CraniumNet rep or Ambassador can prepare a 12 month royalty projection, though sales by nature are unpredictable, even by the most established publishers. Remember, Stephen King and JK Rowling were both turned down repeatedly by all major publishers.

With established affiliates, projections will tend to be more accurate.

Author Requirements

Quality

We are in the Information Age. While you can buy books, discs and surf the internet for days, and find tons of information, unfortunately most of it is very low quality. Misleading, rambling, useless, incorrect or low-value information from people who do not fully understand the subject matter is the norm.

What will set CraniumNet apart is that we will maintain a very high quality level in both the effectiveness and conciseness of the content, and the quality of the presentation and user experience.

The courses we syndicate will be clear, focused, to-the-point, valuable and practical. We will strive to make the learning experience captivating and enjoyable, with world class production values.

Demos

Each author will provide three or more brief free courses or free excerpts from fee-based courses to serve as “demos” or “teasers” so that potential students, at no cost, can experience the quality of this Author’s courses.

Questions

Each course has an “Ask A Question” button that will post the student’s question on a CraniumNet website forum. We ask each Author to dedicate a few minutes every few days for each course they teach to answer student questions. Not only does this provide interactive help to the students, it also provides the Author with an insight into what the students are having trouble with, and what courses might be most valuable and popular in the future.

Authoring Process Overview

Feasibility Consultation

Course ideas must be discussed with and approved by your Ambassador or CraniumNet representative before beginning a course.

The purpose of this is to:

• avoid starting courses that will have very low student interest

• brainstorm content to make each course as valuable as possible

• discuss ways to dovetail with other courses so that courses naturally lead to each other

• avoid extremely similar courses that would be confusing to students

Outline

The next step is to submit an outline that can be perused to make sure it meets CraniumNet objectives as outlined above.

Script

Once the outline is approved, the next step is to submit a finished script that can be tested or evaluated to provide feedback and advice.

Production

Then, the course is produced, a course description is written, and the course goes live!

What’s the next step?

If you are interested in joining CraniumNet, we’d love to hear from you.

Please include:

• Your bio

• Ideas of courses you would like to author

Thanks for your interest in becoming a CraniumNet Author.

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